IMHO, high end wood is harder to find, but ingots are more valuable because
you need more ingots to do anything. Wood is used for making weapons and
enhancing, for which you don't need that much. 95% of ingots used is for BODs, and you need them in the thousands.

Stratics Veteran

That and each swing of the axe yields 10 logs, while one swing of the pickaxe yields 1 ore, which makes 2 ingots. So it takes longer to mine 10 ingots than it does to chop 10 logs. On the higher end metals there is also the chance to fail at smelting, so it can cut your rewards in half.

However, there is also the balance that miners can upgrade their ore spots not just once, but twice...and in doing so have the possibility of spawning an elemental with 25 large ore of it's type on it (50 ingots at no-fail smelt)

I think for wood you need to pick an area and keep chopping there. When I jack I mark any tree ash and above then go back and harvest those to get at least useful wood. I also hit random trees in the area. The only uses for normal wood are training, furnature, amo, heartwood.

I think ingot prices went up because with the bod changes more folks are filling deeds to get new deeds which takes a ton of ingots. I figure I could burn through over a million ingots and still have iron deeds to fill. On other shards one can just go to the local NPC and buy ingots. Here all iron must be mined or recycled from junk.

I use Ash and Yew for enhancing, bloodwood for my armour and occasionally heartwood if I'm trying for something special, eg. I have a heartwood suit which has 5% hci on each piece. I use it with jewels and pirates hat with swords skill to be able to collect my own bones.

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